It is known in the construction industry, particularly the building of dwelling houses and other buildings, to erect a rain gutter at roof edges. Such gutters usually have associated downpipes. By these means, water coming off the roof may be intercepted, collected, and diverted into desired locations. This avoids splashing, "trenching", flooding, and other undesired effects. A persistent problem with such gutters is that they collect leaves, sticks, roof granules, pine needles, and other debris as well. This causes the gutters and/or down-pipes to become blocked. As a result, water backs up, causing it to flood over the gutter edges and sometimes down the side of the building, and permitting freezing in the gutter to occur. It may also or alternatively cause the gutter to accumulate pools of water which do not drain off rapidly or readily, and cause weeping and/or rusting of joint areas and sometimes freeze into ice in cold weather. Additionally, gutters may become broken by snow and/or ice sliding off the associated roof.
In an attempt to overcome the necessity for manually clearing the gutters and/or down pipes periodically, usually by ascending a ladder, various proposals have been made. They range from applying screens to cover the gutter openings, to deflector means. The general experience has been that the installation of screens basically does little more than relocate the problem of debris blocking from the gutter to the screen, necessitating periodic manual removal anyway. From time to time, it has been proposed to use "deflector" type devices, by which it was contended it would be possible to redirect the flow of rainwater coming off of the top surface of a roof into a gutter, free of debris which will, in the meantime have been ejected off of the roof onto the ground. Some of such deflector type devices include a lower arcuate surface by which, theoretically, water coming down the roof will, by the effect of surface tension, be forced to follow around the arcuate surface. By this means, it was postulated that the water may be deposited in the gutter which is positioned inside and below the arcuate surface, while debris carried by the water is jettisoned off, more or less tangentially to the curved surface, and falls to the ground. In this connection, reference is made to the following U.S. Pat. Nos.: Van Horn 546,042; Nye 603,611; Cassen 836,012; Cassens 891,405; Yates 1,101,047, Goetz 2,672,832, Bartholomew 2,669,950; Heier 2,873,700; Natthews et al 2,935,954; Foster 3,388,555; Homa 3,507,396; and Zukauskas 3,950,951.
A remarkable thing about devices such as the foregoing is that although the basic theory has been available for some time, as far as is now known, it has never actually been adopted or used in what might reasonably be described as a commercial embodiment. In part, this may be because there is little to impell builder-contractors to incur whatever extra cost or expense involved in making such installation initially. Once a conventional system has been installed, to "retrofit" an existing installation involves troublesome, time-consuming, costly, basic and/or aesthetically undesirable structural alterations to the existing gutter installation and, in many cases, to the building with which it is associated. It also appears that a reason why the concept has not found significant or widespread use is because, as disclosed to date, it didn't work with a sufficient degree of reliability or effectiveness to make it practically feasible. That is, practicing the extant disclosures as taught, it has been found that surface tension of the water often is not sufficient to contain the water through an arcuate travel path against counter-forces typically encountered from factors such as a large volume of water, steep slopes, "rivuletting", etc. Whatever the particular reasons, the impressive fact is the lack of their adoption and use to date, in spite of the obvious advantages which might occur if they could be used, in light of the costs and difficulty of obtaining maintenance labor, particularly in recent times.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide means for accomodating roof-water while segregating debris therefrom.
Another object of this invention is to provide such means in a form which is substantially maintenance free.
Still another object of this invention is to provide means for accomplishing some or all of the foregoing objectives in a form which is structurally simple and easy to install.
Yet another object of this invention is to provide means for accomplishing some or all of the foregoing objectives which is adapted for retrofitting existing installations.